


Cut You Down

by naomichomsky



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 09:00:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29731476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naomichomsky/pseuds/naomichomsky
Summary: Orville Peck's Pony is the soundtrack to Courier Six's arc - change my mind.A character study of Courier Six as she experiences the events of Fallout: New Vegas.This does tie in loosely to my other Fallout work, eventually, but the works exist independently of each other.
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

When the woman awoke, there was only pain. 

The pain was sharp and stabbing, as if an ice pick was being driven directly into her skull. Somewhere far above her, off in the muted distance, she heard screaming – hoarse, ragged, and painful. Her own throat felt raw, scratched and bloody, as if she herself was the one shrieking in agony. Belatedly, the woman realized that the screams reverberating in her skull were _hers_ , but the pain was too great to dwell on this revelation for too long. 

Far away and far above her she heard a voice, gentle and murmuring but rife with worry. The woman felt cool, soothing relief on her forehead, then a sharp prick in her arm. An icy heat shot through her veins, crawling up her limbs and making every part of her feel heavy and limp. She let herself drift off into the darkness, falling into a dreamless slumber. 

The next time the woman awoke the ice-pick pain was still present but blissfully dulled. Groggily, she opened her eyes, letting them adjust to the light before taking in her surroundings. 

An old man in an equally ancient homestead greeted her. The man fussed and worried over her as she attempted to sit up, ignoring her hissing venom and fearful anger as he situated her into a more comfortable seated position.

After her initial shock and suspicion towards him the man relayed her story to her...at least all that he knew of it. She had taken a bullet to the head and was left for dead in a shallow grave. The man who did it was a Vegas type – all fancy suit, slick hair and fast talk. Her salvation came in the form of a confused robot, who had dragged her out of her grave and deposited her body on the doctor’s doorstep without any explanation. 

The doctor wanted to ask her probing and inane questions, “just in order to get a sense of you, maybe your background or what you were doing” he claimed. Distressingly, she realized she could not give the doctor many answers to anything at all. Seemingly, the bullet that tore through her brain had also torn through her memories. She remembered absolutely nothing. 

But she answered mechanically and automatically, barely paying attention to his useless questionnaire. All she could focus on now was the rage that thrummed through her veins. Her blood was alight with fury, coursing through her with such intensity that she was nearly vibrating. 

She supposed she should have felt more afraid. Maybe she should have felt sad, or grieved for her lost memories and lost life. She had nothing, after all. She couldn’t remember the faces of her parents, if she had had a dog as a kid, growing up, friends, first loves and heartbreak. She had nothing...She was a completely blank slate. But she realized that instead of distress or sorrow, or panic or fear, she felt nothing but righteous and blazing anger.

The man who did this to her, the Vegas man in the checkered coat with the greased back hair – he would pay. He would pay for his crimes against her, and she would relish in his agony, this she swore on her own grave. The man who stole her memories and her previous life, who had in truth been successful in his mission to kill her - he would regret his actions with his dying breath. For in his cruelty and in her death something entirely new had been borne – a being made of pure vengeance, a creature who knew nothing but hate and violence and would return all that was done to her in full and then some. He would know her suffering and her fury, and anyone who attempted to stand in her way would not be spared. 

***

The woman was strong. She wasn’t charming or persuasive – that was made painfully obvious at her pitiful attempts to rally the people of Goodsprings to fight the incoming thugs who threatened the town. The thugs that they had unsubtly asked for her help with, she noted with irritation. But she found she was large and powerful, and after the first three gangsters fell before her, their skulls caved in by her bloodied club, the good and fearful people of Goodsprings decided it was better to join her than oppose her. The fight was laughably short after that, and as she pulled her weapon from the face of the final miserable gangster with a sickening ( _satisfying_ ) squelch, she heard a cough from behind her. 

The woman turned and saw Sunny, the town’s only security - the only person who had volunteered to help her in the beginning, no questions asked - looking askance and refusing to make eye contact with her. She held a bag of jangling caps in her hand. 

“This is for you – for your help with the Powder Gangers.” Her eyes darted everywhere but to meet her own gaze. “I think you may have better luck in Primm…we don’t have much to offer you here in the way of answers, so you should probably make haste that way.” 

It wasn’t spoken but the message was clear: 

_We don’t want you here._

She grabbed the bag and curtly nodded to Sunny before turning over her shoulder, surveying the land before her. The Wasteland was cruel and unforgiving.

_Good_. 

The land would shape her and make her stronger. The longer she survived, the tougher she would become, and the harsher the punishment she could inflict upon the Vegas man in the checkered coat.


	2. Chapter 2

Sunny had lied.

Primm held no answers, only cowards curling up in the safety of a dilapidated casino while a group of escaped Powder Gangers from the nearby prison took control of the crumbling hotel standing at the center of their town.

Only two good things had come from the woman’s visit to Primm – the restoration of ED-E, and the wanton bloodshed of evil men.

The restoration of ED-E the eyebot had come as a shock to her, truth be told. She had no idea that she knew anything about robots or programming, but as soon as she had flipped open the cover of ED-E’s circuit board her hands flew almost of their own accord, something akin to muscle memory. She deftly and quickly repaired the robot, getting it back into working shape in only a few hours. Its previous owner, a weathered but soft man whose name she promptly forgot, had no qualms about handing ownership of the eyebot directly over to her.

As for the violence – well, apparently the town’s “sheriff” had gotten himself captured by the Powder Gangers and was trapped in the hotel they claimed. He was a cowardly, sad man named Beagle, and she had left him shackled on the first floor while she and ED-E efficiently ( _gleefully_ ) disposed of every Ganger in the hotel the group had dug into. Any protests or grumblings about his treatment died in the sheriff’s throat when she had returned to free him of his bonds, covered in the blood and viscera of the fallen Gangers.

“Th-the man in the suit, he was with a bunch of K-khans. Uh, they, they went to Nipton I think. I s-swear, that’s all I know!” Beagle had stuttered when the woman questioned him, lip quivering as if on the verge of tears.

_Pathetic._

With a sneer, she cut his bonds, not bothering to wait before making her way out of the hotel. She would go to Nipton at dawn. But first, she would hole up in the bombed-out ruins above the now-defunct Mojave Express. She had managed to snag a few bottles of whiskey and vodka from her trawl through the hotel, and though she knew she needed rest, she had no intentions of staying anywhere near the residents of Primm in the nearby casino. So she made her lonely camp in the husk of the building of her former employer, and fell into a drunken, fitful sleep.

***

Turns out, one can’t get to Nipton without first stopping in at the Mojave Outpost, an NCR “stronghold” in the Mojave Wasteland. With bitter irony, she realized that while she knew nothing of her own life before the bullet tore through her brain, she still somehow knew what the NCR was, and the Legion, and much of the ridiculous politics that ravaged the Wasteland.

It wasn’t all a bust, though. The Outpost had a surprisingly well-stocked bar, and a surprisingly well-stacked patron by the name of Rose of Sharon Cassidy.

“And just who might you be?” the redhead asked when the woman approached, swirling whiskey in her glass tumbler.

For the first time since she woke up in the doctor’s home, she faltered. No one had asked her her name.

_How had no one asked her her name before this?_

It seemed impossible but it was true. And she didn’t know her name, couldn’t strum up any recollection or hint in her shattered, broken mind. She floundered for a moment, adrift in a sea of uncertainty and insecurity, having a complete identity crisis while hitting on a stranger in an NCR bar. She scrambled, mind racing, and the only blasted thing her memory could summon was one of the fading posters in the doctor’s home.

“Atomic,” She said finally, wincing immediately at the ridiculous name. Why couldn’t that stupid doctor have anything hanging up besides a damn poster for some place called the Atomic Wrangler?

Rose of Sharon Cassidy was still for a beat before smirking slightly, leaning closer in, hand casually brushing hers as she reached for a lighter. “Like the bomb, eh?”

She – Atomic now, she supposed – leered, lips curling up into a predatory grin, grateful for the easy pass.

“What can I say, doll? I’m a bombshell, and I’ll rock your world.”

Rose of Sharon Cassidy tipped her head back, exposing her beautiful pale neck, and laughed throatily. When she collected herself, she brought the lit cigarette to her lips, inhaling seductively.

“I have no doubt you will. Your room or mine?”

***

Atomic had been loathe to leave Cass that morning, but she couldn’t let anyone come between her and the man in the checkered coat. Before she left the outpost, she climbed up onto the roof of one of the buildings and spoke briefly to the NCR sniper stationed there. The scout told her of smoke rising from the town of Nipton, and was willing to pay caps for information about it. Atomic promised to report anything amiss in the town back to the sniper and set off down the lonely road towards Nipton.

The road there was fairly boring, save for wiping out a few scorpions and gangsters (this gang she hadn’t recognized, but knew they weren’t Powder Gangers due to the lack of their signature prison garb).

Not too far out of Nipton (and boy, that sniper was right, smoke was pouring out of Nipton’s city center), a roughed-up boy sprinted up to her, panting and begging for help.

“She’s trying to kill me, she’s crazy!” he cried, clutching at her.

Atomic shook him off, putting a sizable distance between them, but she clutched her spiked club (liberated from a particularly creative Powder Ganger) in trepidation.

“What are you talking about?” Atomic growled, eyes scanning the horizon.

She could see a woman a bit off in the distance, clad in nothing more than glorified rags, sprinting towards them.

“She wants my necklace, but she can’t have it!” He cried, fumbling with his pistol as he clumsily tried to reload it.

The woman was upon them now, eyes crazed and fingers bloody. With one quick glance at the boy she could match the blood to the scratches that covered his body. Atomic sighed, but nonetheless attempted to help. She wasn’t evil, after all. She assumed.

“You…You killed her! Her head…” the boy fell to his knees in front of the fallen woman as Atomic wrenched her spiked bat from the side of the crazed woman’s head.

“Well, if you didn’t want her dead, you shouldn’t have run to me screaming about how she wanted to kill you,” Atomic replied, attempting to shake the scraps of skin from her weapon.

The boy’s mouth hung open, gaping. “B-but maybe you could have reasoned with her?”

“Nope,” Atomic replied, popping the “p”, hefting the bat over her shoulder. “Now what is this necklace she was after?”

“What?” The boy said distantly, still staring at the remains of the woman.

“The necklace. I want it.” Atomic stated, staring at him.

She didn’t really want it, but the boy was annoying her, and she had had to kill someone for him, so she felt that she deserved something for her trouble.

“What?!” The boy looked fully alert now, and somewhat scandalized. “But it’s my lucky necklace!”

“Yeah, and _luckily_ for you I was here to defend you. I kept you from getting killed. So hand it over.”

To make her point clear she hefted the bat from her shoulder into her offhand, staring at him in what she hoped was a menacing expression. Whatever face she made must have worked because he only gulped before reluctantly taking off the cap necklace and handing it to her.

“I hope you choke,” he spit. He looked at her one last time, loathing and hatred in his eyes, before sprinting off into the Mojave. Atomic simply shrugged. She had no care if people hated her. Worrying about what people thought of you made a person weak, she reckoned, and she couldn’t be weak if she wanted to find the man in the checkered coat.

***

Nipton was a disaster.

Atomic wasn’t sure if she would ever be able to get the smell of burning rubber and burning flesh out of her nose. She had met a vile creature - a wretched excuse of a man who called himself _Vulpes Inculta_ \- who tried to indoctrinate her with appalling rhetoric about how sinful men _deserved_ to be hung on crosses.

She may not have remembered anything about who she was before the bullet, but Atomic was absolutely certain about one thing – she would never abide by slavery. The notion alone churned her stomach. She wasn’t sure why it made her so uneasy, but she knew she could never ally with Caesar’s Legion. And because of this instinctual, gut-reaction – the first gut reaction she’d had since she woke up – she knew she would have to kill every one of Caesar’s Legion, or die trying.

To prove a point – either to herself or _Vulpes_ , she wasn’t sure – she went through Nipton Town hall and slaughtered every wolf roaming its halls. It wasn’t as good as killing legionnaires themselves, but hopefully soon she would get that pleasure.

In the meantime, she had received an important location from the alleged “lottery winner”. A man she had cut down without prejudice outside the city’s borders. A small town called Novac. The man in the checkered coat had gone there with the so-called “Khans”, and so she would dutifully follow, a ghostly specter on his heels.


End file.
